Ivana Mladenovic Wins Goran Paskaljevic Award at LIFFE
A director who has lived and worked in Bucharest for two decades receives the award named for Goran Paskaljevic, the 19th LIFFE's second honor after the Golden Thread went to the Mitevski sisters.
Ivana Mladenovic says she genuinely did not expect this award. More telling than the modesty itself is what she recalled right after thanking the jury: that her family watched Goran Paskaljevic’s films on television so many times that the dialogue became something everyone knew by heart, and that people recognized themselves in them. A director who, explaining her own award, reaches for an evening in front of a small screen rather than a solemn line about film as art is already saying something about what the award is actually for.
The Artistic Council and the Board of the 19th Leskovac International Film Director’s Festival announced today, September 11, that this year’s Goran Paskaljevic Award goes to her. The decision was signed jointly with Kristina Paskaljevic, the director’s wife, and this year’s competition for the statuette itself was themed around his film “The Dog Who Loved Trains.” This is the second festival honor we have written about this week, after the Golden Thread award that earlier went to sisters Teona and Labina Mitevski, so the picture of the 19th LIFFE takes shape from two names who, in the region, do not work by the same rules as most domestic production.
The jury’s citation says the award goes to Mladenovic:
for an authentic authorial voice, a fully developed cinematic language and a body of work that, through an original and direct view of reality, affirms humanity, understanding and tolerance. In her films we recognize a particular sensitivity toward people and their everyday lives, as well as the courage to approach complex social and personal themes without simplification or stereotype.
Ivana Mladenovic was born in Kladovo. She graduated in film directing from the National University of Theatre and Film Arts in Bucharest, where she has lived and worked for more than two decades, in an environment that, as she puts it herself, taught her that great ideas are not born from an isolated genius but from a community of directors, writers and actors who listen to one another. Her first feature documentary, “Turn Off the Lights,” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and won the Heart of Sarajevo award for best documentary. She has also directed the fiction features “Soldiers. Story from Ferentari” and “Ivana the Terrible.”
What connects her work to the legacy the award is named for is not stylistic imitation but persistence in the same principle: her films, as a rule, grow out of the real lives of people she has met, often from the margins, with whom she then works to re-perform their own experience in front of the camera. Humor there is not decoration but a tool, the same way it was for Paskaljevic, whose characters, Mladenovic says, always remained believable because the director never placed them ahead of themselves. In an interview for the festival, she also spoke openly about the harder side of the craft, about how film today rarely gets made outside the logic of what will quickly “do well,” and about how an environment that supports experimentation, not just individual talent, remains a condition without which serious filmmaking cannot renew itself.
The 19th LIFFE is also screening her film “Sorella di clausura” on September 18 at 9 p.m. at the National Theatre in Leskovac. A conversation with the award winner is scheduled for September 19 at 5 p.m., in the first floor lobby of the Leskovac Cultural Center, as part of the awards ceremony that closes the festival. The ninth and final day of the festival, which runs from September 15 to 19, thus carries a name, a citation, and a chance to talk with the winner in person.
